Preferred Pastimes
by ForASecondThereWe'dWon
Summary: "Is that what you rich people do for fun?" "No," May corrects, watching Tommy extract a cigarette and perch it on his lower lip, "I believe the preferred pastime is luring the object of one's desire away from their home in the middle of the day for a tryst." "The object of my desire," he repeats at a murmur that bounces his unlit cigarette.


**Author's Note:**

Hi! _Preferred Pastimes _is my first story for this fandom, after falling in love with the show in late summer. For the past few years, I've primarily written teen pairings for Riverdale and the MCU's Spider-Man, so it feels REALLY nice to stretch my legs a little and work with adult characters.

I'm on Tumblr as forasecondtherewedwon if you wanna talk Peaky to me!

* * *

"Right," Tommy says, leaning away from the paddock. "That's enough of horses."

May crosses her arms and approaches him with a smirk.

"But that's why you're here, Mr. Shelby." It's sly, how she articulates his name, aware of Micky and other watchful members of her staff. Truthfully, the address is not for their benefit, but for how Tommy raises his eyebrow at her. She runs a hand over the lip of the enclosure, glancing sideways at the lovely dove-coloured horse beyond. "To assess the progress of Grace's Secret."

He looks downwards, swift as a fallen drop of rain, and she knows she's taken the wrong tack. The name he's bestowed to his racer seems determined to weigh more than the animal itself.

"Do you have another plan for today then?" May pushes on, doing her best to stand firm, not flap and flutter vulnerably like ribbon in the breeze. The breeze is the name, Grace's Secret―a name with a power she can't yet chart, but can sense the size of, relative to herself. She must try to let it remain unmeasured.

Tommy has to lift his head to lift his eyes, otherwise they're blocked by his brim. The anticipation of his stare makes her heart pound.

"Yes," he says, eyes clearer than any of the crystal in any of her cabinets.

May takes a calculated step towards him and lowers her voice when she replies.

"I might not have to give instructions for fire-lighting at this time of day, but it will still look suspicious for you and I to re-enter the house and sequester ourselves in my bedroom, alone."

He gives her a genuine smile for that.

"That wasn't what I had in mind."

"No?"

"No." After a thoughtful pause, "Later, maybe."

"So, for now, you don't want to fuck me, just do business?" she asks lightly. "Isn't that precisely what I said to you at the Garrison, after which you proceeded to disbelieve me?"

"I was right to disbelieve you," Tommy accuses, pointing a playful finger at her before tucking her arm up under his and guiding her away from Grace's Secret. "And mind your bloody language. The ears on these horses are very expensive."

"Not to mention the training," May reminds him wryly. She kicks her feet forward in a neat march that has her long skirt straining at the shin.

He scratches his forehead.

"You couldn't imagine the bills for such a thing. Some of these trainers will take the shirt off your back."

His warning makes her laugh and hold tightly to his arm, feeling his curious and approving gaze on the side of her face. When they've escaped the musk of the stables and their environs, Tommy is faithful to his word, not straying towards the house.

"How often do you drive one of your cars, Mrs. Carleton? Not very, eh?"

He's up to some mischief, ready with an answer that's an unimportant presumption―Tommy's plan will flow forth from his words and the crunch of his shoes on the gravel without May's response, she can tell. It's a bit thrilling to be swept up in his sudden ambition for the afternoon. Propelled along on his arm, taking flight does not seem impossible.

"I have a driver, but I do ride in them, you know," she reminds him when they stop in front of his own automobile.

"One like this though?" He unlatches the door and swings the solid thing wide for her, exposing the taut seat. "There's nothing like being inside, I promise you."

Tommy's eyes are devilish and smug, full of dares and promises. May grips the door, the soft tan leather of her glove just shy of his bare hand, and holds her body straight.

"Should I inquire about your intentions?"

"If you like."

She wonders how far ahead his mind has travelled. Can he, even now, see them kissing? Does he fiddle with the fastening on her low boots, the way she did this morning? Are her cries for him already in his ears?

"Ought I to get my hat?" is what May asks, stepping up and sliding onto the seat.

"How about you don't leave my sight and I swear not to make too much of a mess of your hair."

His swift grin is awfully criminal as he thumps her door closed and circles the front of the car with his hands in his coat pockets, elbows out.

"I thought our schedule was business-only," she observes once Tommy's behind the wheel.

He hums, steering for the road.

"I very specifically did _not_ answer that question," he points out and, no, May supposes he didn't. She didn't notice at the time, caught up in the electrification of asking if he wanted to fuck.

Touching the back of her fingers to her mouth as her face pinks, she studies him. The figure he cuts in his coat and his cap and his car. He's hard to read. It occurs to May that this man endures many attempts at being read, a consequence of his work.

"You might have at least let me get a ride in first," she berates him, now that he's got his way. "Shown you how your very expensive horse takes direction. Doesn't that interest you at all?"

Her gaze shoots to the wheel when Tommy's fingers rub tenderly, contemplatively over its curve. His stare is resolutely forward.

"To see you ride? I'd rather see you ridden."

Is it so shocking, these words from a gangster? May doesn't know what he is, not really, down in the meat of him. She wishes he'd speak like a gangster, he obliges. He uses a drive as a pretense to fuck her, she gets in the car.

"Careful," she warns, rising above her deepening blush. "You didn't buy _me_ in an auction."

"I should get you in the bargain after the way you drove the price up on my horse." A fleeting furrow of his brow. "Is that what you rich people do for fun?"

"No," May corrects, watching Tommy extract a cigarette and perch it on his lower lip, "I believe the preferred pastime is luring the object of one's desire away from their home in the middle of the day for a tryst."

"The object of my desire," he repeats at a murmur that bounces his unlit cigarette. Louder, "So why isn't it you driving me out for a fuck? Inducting me into the ways of the rich?"

"Your vehicle was nearest."

And she demurely arranges her hair. Tommy turns his head slightly to watch her, eyes remaining on her hand as it falls back to her lap. As his gaze lingers, so does it snap ahead again a moment later.

"Maybe you could reach my matches for me."

"Much more difficult to extricate than your cigarettes, I'm sure," she teases.

"They're down in my pocket and in all the time it might take to feel around for them… well, I'd hate to wreck this car over a box of matches."

"And us in it."

"And us in it," he agrees with a single nod.

May extends her hand halfway towards him.

"I'm to 'feel around'?"

"Yep."

It almost makes her laugh, the way he keeps the road alone in his sights. She would swear that she feels in the air how strongly he craves to keep track of her hand. May kills his suspense by folding back his unbuttoned coat and wiggling her hand into his pants pocket. Tommy clears his throat and doesn't turn his head.

It's narrow going with him seated like this, very little extra space for her fingers to roam in their searching, but he doesn't rush her; with his thigh on the other side of his pocket and her glove, there's no question why.

"I can't find them," May states.

"Try from the outside," Tommy suggests, ever so helpfully.

She withdraws her hand and places it over the site it lately occupied. With her eyes alone, she can see there's nothing waiting to be mined from his pocket, but she'll play his game, running her gloved palm downwards until the pleats in the wool smooth out.

He clears his throat once more.

"Perhaps farther in."

"What unusually shaped pockets you must have."

"That's what you get in a suit cut by the Birmingham Chinese."

It sounds like the beginning of a children's fairy tale, May thinks, in spite of Tommy's matter-of-fact manner. How easy he makes it to recall his Gypsy heritage by tantalizing her with quotidian legends. How difficult to know when he is joking.

"Hmm," she says, and as she abruptly rakes her gloved fingers back up his thigh, Tommy's leg jumps. "Steady, boy," May soothes. They both know what the tone of a human voice reserved for horses sounds like.

It does not have a calming effect on this beast.

"The matches, May," he urges her gruffly.

The colour high on his cheeks, just beneath the punishing blue of the eyes, reminds her of the pink light of sunset hitting her house's upper panes.

"Take care with your tone," she counsels, feeling the friction of his trouser leg beneath her glove, rounding to still on his inner thigh. "I am not your employee."

"And I'm not your fucking broken stallion."

Tommy grasps May's hand and hitches it up to rest on his crotch.

"Find anything?" he demands.

She's too shocked for a moment to make a reply. He's firming up. May swings an appraising gaze to the side of his face. Wild, this man thinks he is. It's more than possible. But she will not let him throw her.

"You're going to be quite disappointed. Not a single match. I've searched and searched," she avows, squeezing until Tommy grunts in crude pleasure.

"I put them in me coat. Just remembered."

He removes one hand from the wheel and reaches between his coat and his jacket, matchbook visible as it retreats.

"For the sake of you not wrecking the car," May says, presenting her free hand palm-up. Tommy drops the matches into it and says nothing as she lights his cigarette at last.

When he's exhaling velvet curls, he says, "You might as well hold onto those for me," pointing a languid finger at the matchbook wrapped up in her clasp on the seat between them.

"You're confident, then, that you'll be able to devise another charade for the drive back?"

"As my brother so often puts it, I'm Tommy fucking Shelby." He taps the ash away into the wind. "As far as I know, I can do just about anything."

May's a fool, already certain of the depth of her belief in him and that this can only ever end in her foolishness being exposed in some way. It won't be a surprise and he likely won't notice when it happens because men never do. Stables, cars, boots with maddening laces―none of these are things that prevent women from suffering the disillusioning conclusions to their infatuations. Women are the flame and the moth and wealth is the dust on their wings.

Stroking as the world goes by the window, May almost feels it's her driving the car. Her suppressed laugh sails over somebody's field. It's quieter than the soft scrunch of leather around her fingers as they flex to make Tommy's hips shift searchingly and his breath change―shivering and smoky like a cracked chimney.

He jerks the automobile to the side of the road, creating an impolite lurch. He's sliding out from under her hand and the steering wheel before May can properly chastise this changeable amateur gentleman. Her heart pounds like a racehorse's, her fingers bearing down on his little matchbook, and the way Tommy swings her door wide is like the gate she's meant to spring from to go barrelling down the track, around and around, to lameness or glory. But she has more composure than that.

May tosses the man's matches to the seat and steps from the car while he holds the door. Tommy could've offered his hand, but it's better, for a moment, that they don't touch. Too worked up, the both of them.

She strides to the center of the country road―a lane, really―and hears him shut the door. Looking around reveals how dark it is back on her estate. Flightless, despite its many wings. Eventually, May turns back to Tommy. His hands are deep in his trouser pockets and his waning cigarette dangles. He provides a hundred thousand reasons to watch his mouth.

Eyeing him as he remains standing next to her door (as if he'll presently have to assist another lady), May rounds to the stripe of grass between the wheels and a shallow ditch. The width is no more than two feet. Tommy might have pulled farther off the road, but with no other cars in sight, it's true that there wasn't a need.

He's followed her.

"Take off your gloves."

May turns, chin up and defiant.

"My gloves? Why?"

"Because you're going to want to put them in your mouth." Tommy waves his cigarette to indicate the landscape. "Lot of low, flat land around here. Barely a copse of trees in the last two miles." He brings it back to his lips and inhales. "Sound carries."

And she can imagine it doing just as he says, exactly the way the wind carries the smoke away when he speaks.

The handsome dark hang of his coat obscures any view of his risen cock. It doesn't matter though―Tommy's need is apparent in his very fingertips, flicking the end of his cigarette into the ditch. Nothing frivolous for this gangster. May comprehends that he requires a dalliance with her as much as he requires that his horse be trained for Epsom, or that his car be fueled, his cigarette lit. Everything always moving him forward to bear down on his goal. All the gears turning.

Instead of removing her gloves, she takes hold of the open folds of his coat. Tommy allows her this and licks his lower lip before rubbing his thumb across her chin.

"Your makeup," he says, voice full of grit from his last suck of smoke. "It's purple, like a bruise."

He means her lipstick, of course, as it's May's mouth he has his gaze fixed on. She stays quiet and breathes the sharp air quickly through her nose.

"Reminds me of something healing. As though the hurt has already passed."

This is unusually profound of him and gives her the sense of seeing suddenly through a window you believed to be a mirror. A depth May nearly trips and falls into. Like this damned ditch behind them.

"Tommy," she presses, and this time he steps close to her body, removing his hand from her face to allow their mouths to connect, lock.

May slots her hands inside his coat, holding his waist below the straps of his holster. Of course, Thomas Shelby is armed. He uses her less aggressive grasp to his advantage, forcing her abruptly back against the car, lips parting hungrily as though he will consume her. She unbuttons her coat swiftly while they toss steamy exhalations back and forth. And then the heat of their bodies collides, some lost, but more created all the time―his clever fingers brushing her coat down from her neck and shoulders, hers clutching the waist of his pants, dropping to his cock.

Tommy strips the outer layer from her, harsher than she imagines he would skin a buck, and stuffs the coat through the car window. May's hands move to his jaw because there's no question he'll want to handle the lower business himself. His fingers graze hers as they pass. Unfastening his trousers, he closes his eyes and she is overwhelmed by the tension in his neck. On her. On her is where it will be released.

His strong hands fumble for her hips, bunching her skirt as he turns her to face the car. May's dizzy, hot and cold, still wearing her gloves. It's unclear how serious Tommy's command for their removal was until she places her palms on the side of the car and he reaches to tug at a glove with one hand, the other now on the skin of her bare thigh, skirt gathered high.

"I'm not putting those in my mouth," May says forcefully, assisting Tommy in striping them from her fingers.

"Better give them to me then."

His suggestion is a murky breath low on the back of her neck. She feels his lips touch down fleetingly as he collects the gloves from her and, presumably, stores them away in his coat pocket.

May has a glance over her shoulder.

"You aren't keeping them."

A surprising smile makes Tommy youthful. He stamps it onto her mouth.

"No, Mrs. Carleton. I wouldn't dare."

"Now I really don't believe you," she pants as his fingertips navigate the line of her garter belt's strap like he's walking a cliff's edge.

Unexpectedly, he grabs meaty hold of her backside. May never believed his mania for a fuck in the countryside would permit a state of complete undress, but the fact of him sliding down her knickers to the lowest latitude her gartered stockings will allow is still and again shocking. Tommy winds his grip idly up her inner thigh. When his other arm comes around her, May grasps it and belts it to her waist for the stability to stave off her own hysteria, rising as he nears the hot place at her center.

Tommy's nose squashes against her neck and his fingertips run against her, faster as the wetness grows. Since their first meeting, he's shown May a restlessness she certainly hadn't known before. She wishes she could pace, pour a cup of tea she won't drink, something to ease the insensibility of his unhurried caresses. He strokes briskly to the front of her and she shudders.

She's going to protest when he pries his arm from her grip, but he smoothes his hand down her other arm instead―the full length―until his naked hand rests over hers, braced on the car. May does something vulgar. She reaches down and raises the front of her skirt, keeping it out of Tommy's way. It's agreeable to him; his motions become less exploratory, more purposeful. Her hips are jerking and she's making small, animal cries as he rubs fiercely, tucking his groin against her rear. With his arm looped in an unyielding band around her hip, Tommy drags his freed cock up and down. Her eyes squeeze shut. She pictures his hips rocking doggedly, fine trousers around his ankles on the grass. The pleasure prickles all over her body.

Tommy's finger, just one, dips more boldly to ring her canal from the inside. So many delicate tasks it has surely accomplished (placing each cigarette between his lips like an artist places a stroke on a canvas). So many brutal ones (slicing to bring eternal darkness to the eyes of the enemies of the Peaky Blinders). Legs quaking, May cries out and buries her mouth and nose in his sleeve. Her muffled sounds crescendo and her hips fit naturally back into his―this is the moment Tommy Shelby chooses to mount her.

The hand greedily cupping and smearing her want falls mere inches to smartly tap the flesh of her inner thigh, widening May's stance as Tommy hunches and probes. Smoggy gasps in her ear. Robust woolen sleeve on her face. And then, he's pressing inside and her eyes fly open. It's outlandish and thrilling, out here in the open, between the gangster and his automobile. He sinks deeper and deeper―or is it higher and higher?―easing up into her. The metal of his car is cold to the touch; Tommy's fingers are turning white where they grasp between hers.

He fills May fully just the once to start, yet insistently enough to stir the beginnings of a worry that his slow thrust will not desist until he's lifted her feet off the ground. Madman. She does gasp when he's fitted himself perfectly inside her (her knees wobble, but the soles of her boots remain on the grass), she has to because it feels as though all of that pressure needs a release valve.

The exhale from Tommy's lips is rich and rough and sinful and May swoons a little from that, a little from the internal caress, as he withdraws. Like all returns made by the Peaky Blinders, the one where Tommy thrusts back inside her is volatile in arrival and pace. She bites his sleeve and finds the texture ghastly between her teeth, so she yelps into the fabric instead.

"Told you," he grunts, sliding out and in again as her body jerks, trying to find a pattern in his unpredictable movements. "Should've kept the gloves."

"One of many differences between myself and your horse," May gasps, "is that I will not tolerate leather in my mouth. Not to bite down on in pain. Not to―_unnh!_" Tommy scoops his hips and she drops her weight instinctively in pursuit of the feeling. "Not to temper my voice in any circumstance."

And then May curses ferociously, fingers twisting in her skirt, feeling as though everything, a world's worth of pleasure, is simultaneously entering and seeping from her.

"What will you tolerate in your mouth, eh?"

His lips smile against her ear. His fingers rub at her unrelentingly. May squeezes her eyes closed as she is tossed between his kindness and his cruelty. Her body knows when to surrender to this puzzle of Thomas Shelby where her mind does not; there's kick in her hips as she rides him to bliss. Like hell has _he_ been the one riding her.

The end is as violent as smashed glass, wretched as heartache. Also, wonderful. She collapses a little and uses it as a sly method of wiping the tear that runs from the corner of her eye onto Tommy's sleeve. Who knows how much of her lately-praised plum lipstick is on his coat, her chin, etcetera. He leaves off stroking her with his fingers (thank goodness―May's aflame there more than anyplace else) to press his palm somewhat tenderly to her abdomen, his hips heaving their last. This touch inspires a horrid flash of an impossible future in which she is pregnant with his child, horrid only in the fact of glimpsing it, the brutality of that false divination. Oh, this will never be a tame man. Nor will she be under his special protection while he remains wild.

Tommy drags himself from her in every way. May hitches and tugs and smoothes and wipes and turns. There are his blue eyes. Her hands are numb, her insides are still in rippling throes. This is what they have: his matches in the palm of her hand, her refusal of a fire in the guest wing.

And horses.


End file.
